Simultaneous determination of six mycotoxins in peanut by high‐performance liquid chromatography with a fluorescence detector

BACKGROUND Mycotoxins, which may contaminate peanut and peanut products, are responsible for many diseases to humans. Aflatoxin B1 (AFB1), aflatoxin G1 (AFG1), aflatoxin B2 (AFB2), aflatoxin G2 (AFG2), ochratoxin A (OTA) and zearalenone (ZEN) are considered the most relevant groups of mycotoxins found in food. This work aimed to develop a high‐performance liquid chromatography method with a fluorescence detector (HPLC‐FLD) combined with dispersive liquid–liquid microextraction (DLLME) method for the simultaneous determination of the six mycotoxins in peanuts. The six mycotoxins were simultaneously determined under their best wavelength by means of changing wavelength. RESULTS Under the optimum conditions, the linear ranges were 1–100 ng mL−1 for AFB1, AFG1 and OTA, 0.3–30 ng mL−1 for AFB2 and AFG2, 5–1000 ng mL−1 for ZEN, with the correlation coefficient (R2) of 0.9969–0.9997. Limits of detection (LODs) were 0.10, 0.10, 0.30, 0.03, 0.03 and 1.0 µg kg−1, respectively, and the mean recoveries were in the range of 83.1% to 99.3% with RSD < 10% (n = 6, independent analysis). Thirteen (46%) of these tested samples were contaminated with at least one mycotoxin. CONCLUSION The proposed method was demonstrated to be simple, highly selective, accurate, reliable, and was successfully applied to simultaneously analyse the six mycotoxins in real peanut samples from China.